Manual Processes

Currently SAFE requires a number of manual interventions to turn requests for accounts of budget changes into changes on Athena. This is being automated, but SAFE is undergoing a period of development so automation is at an early point.

Generally, given the requirement for EPCC to assign requests to Athena and for them to be processed the turn around time for a request is around 24 hours.

SAFE budgets and SLURM accounts

A budget in SAFE is turned into an account in SLURM, although this budget is allocated in monthly tranches rather than all in one go. E.g. a budget of 1,000,000 core hours in SAFE named thing might be allocated over 10 months on Athena as a SLURM account of name thing with 100,000 core hours each month.